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Image of 16th and Highland, National City

John Baldessari

American
(1931–2020)

16th and Highland, National City
1966-1967

Photo emulsion and acrylic on canvas
16.5 x 16.5 x 2.125 in.
Gift of the Marie Eccles Caine Foundation
1998.40

While Ed Ruscha’s distinctive photo-and-text work of the early and mid-1960s provided a bridge between pop and conceptual art, it was primarily John Baldessari, and later artists like William Wegman and Robert Cumming, who combined photography and text with humor to create a peculiarly potent strain of California conceptual art. Such work is distinguished by its use of understated wit in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp, and Baldessari is a master of the visual one-liner presented with a self-effacing, low-key humor.

The abundance of mundane, small-town detail captured in Baldessari’s seemingly random drive-by photographs of National City, the artist’s hometown, provided the perfect deadpan reply to skewer the pretensions of the “serious” conceptual art practiced at the time in New York and London. The fact that Baldessari could make cutting-edge conceptual work while living and teaching in relatively provincial circumstances is primarily a tribute to his intelligence and tenacity (though also partly the result of the “global village” impact of art periodicals in the 1960s).

16th and Highland, National City: what you read is what you see. Perhaps such a guileless environment was liberating to Baldessari as he sought the simplest, most accessible form art can take: pictures with captions such as you’d find in a high-school yearbook, a photo album on the coffee table, or the local newspaper. Blowing them up big like a painting and putting them on canvas: that’s how you know it’s art.

Hugh M. Davies

Keywords
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This object has the following keywords:
billboards*, photographs*, power lines*, store, streets, traffic signs*
  • billboards - Flat surfaces or boards, sometimes substantial structures, constructed for or used for posting announcements or advertisements.
  • photographs - Refers to still images produced from radiation-sensitive materials (sensitive to light, electron beams, or nuclear radiation), generally by means of the chemical action of light on a sensitive film, paper, glass, or metal. Photographs may be positive or negative, opaque or transparent. The concept does not include reproductive prints of documents and technical drawings, for which descriptors found under "" are more appropriate. The concept may include photographs made by digital means.
  • power lines - Wires used for transmitting a supply of electrical energy to buildings.
  • store
  • streets
  • traffic signs - Signs giving directions, warnings, or other information pertinent for vehicles or pedestrians.

Exhibition List
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Collecting on the Edge Part II
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Photographs

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